“Hey,” I said from the doorway. Lacey and her ladies in waiting all looked up at me, but I ignored them. Molly raised an eyebrow at me. “I need to talk to you.”
“So talk.” She shrugged. She thought she was a badass now. She didn’t know the half of it.
“In private?”
Molly paused for just long enough to make Lacey and company wonder if she might dare to blow off a cool senior like me. Then she hopped off the counter and followed me into Ted’s parents’ bedroom.
“As you were,” I said to the others, and shut the bathroom door. I had closed the bedroom door on my way in.
“What did you want to say?” asked Molly, folding her arms. “You told me so?”
“Did you really knee him in the balls?” I asked.
“As hard as I could,” she said.
“What’d he do?”
“He got the hell off me.”
“No,” I said. “Before you kneed him.”
“Oh.” Molly had her arms crossed, and I noticed that she hugged herself a little. “He was holding my arms behind my back.” She looked away from me. “All I could think was how we were at school. I mean, we’d left all his friends in Thistleton, like, ten minutes earlier.” Her eyes flicked back to my face, and I saw that she thought maybe it was a game, that they’d all known what Hugh would do and were laughing at her.
“They don’t know what he’s like,” I said quietly. “They’re not that awful.”
“It’s not like I wasn’t thinking about sleeping with him.” Molly lifted her chin, and I could see that the toughness was covering something else. She was trying hard to convince herself that it wasn’t her fault. “But not like that.”
“Of course not,” I said. “But why are you here? You never came to these things before you went out with him.”
She pressed her lips together. “Because I needed him—them—to know that I wasn’t sitting at home all weekend weeping about it. Screw him. Only, you know, not.”
“Just stay away from him,” I told her. “You don’t have to prove anything. You already got him where it hurts him the most.”
“That’s for sure,” she smirked.
“I mean you got away.”
Just then the bathroom door banged open, and Lacey started screaming.
“It’s burning! My hair is going to burn off! Turn on the shower! Get it off! Aaaaaagh, it’s in my eyes!”
Molly ran into the bathroom, and I went back downstairs. It had begun raining, driving everyone who’d been out on the deck and in the yard inside. The keg had been dragged into the kitchen, and Tom was helping the guy who’d lit my cigarette earlier hold his drunk buddy Russell upside down while he sucked on the tap.
“Here, this’ll make anything more entertaining,” Melissa emerged from the crowd and handed me a shot. Tequila, I could tell by the smell. I guessed that one wouldn’t hurt me, and besides, she had a point. “Come here,” she said, and we licked the salt off each other’s throats, took our shots, and kissed over a wedge of lime. Hugh and Jake made appreciative noises, and Melissa flicked her hand dismissively at them. “Not you fools. This is about me and my girl! I’m going to miss you next year, Court.” She slung an arm around my neck, and I realized she was much drunker than I’d first thought.
“It’s okay, Mel,” I patted her shoulder. “We’ll visit. Williamstown isn’t that long a drive from New York.”
“I know, but it won’t be the same,” pouted Melissa. “I’m so glad we became friends, Courtney. If you hadn’t started going out with Ted…you know what I mean? I used to think you were kind of weird.” She giggled guiltily. “I never you told you that! But I thought you were a weirdo freshman year. Do you hate me? You hate me now, don’t you?”
“Never,” I promised.
“There she is,” said Hugh, and the echo of Ted’s welcome out by the fire bothered me. But what bothered me more was that he meant Molly, who had just come down the stairs and was standing alone in the front hall, just visible through the doorway in the kitchen. And what bothered me most was the nasty curl to his lip as he started toward her. I broke away from Melissa, who immediately moved on to Jake, flinging her arms around his neck and shrieking about how much she loved him.
“Hugh,” I said, but he ignored me. I stepped in front of him and put both hands on his chest. “Dammit, Hugh, leave her alone.”
Hugh glared down at me and clasped both my wrists. “What do you want, Courtney?”
I had a feeling that as much as Molly had come to the party to prove something to Hugh, he had something to prove to her, too. I couldn’t let that happen. I stood there, frozen, my hands locked in Hugh’s. I thought of Lexi, kissing him to keep his attention while she poured chemicals into his bottle of whiskey.
“Meet me in the barn,” I said to him. I was aiming for seductive and landing somewhere near pathetic and desperate. I just wanted him focused on something else long enough for Molly to get a ride home.
He smirked. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I think we need to talk.”
“Talk, huh?” He pulled me closer to him in the crowd, his hands dropping from my wrists to my waist. “I knew you’d come around. I knew you liked it, I could tell.” He grinned down at me, and it was awful, his hands on me and his stinking breath so close to my face. But at least he seemed to have forgotten about Molly for the moment. “All right. Let me get another beer. I’ll meet you down there in five minutes. You know how to unlock it?”
“Duh.” The big doors that faced the yard would be latched from the inside, and the smaller door around the side would be locked, but we both knew the tricks of the Parker property: a long stick, like one of the marshmallow skewers, could be slipped between the large doors to lift the latch.
Hugh held up one hand, fingers spread, and mouthed “five minutes,” then turned away toward the keg. I scooted into the front hallway, where Molly glanced up, startled. I stepped over the dog gate that closed off the formal living room—God forbid if any beer spilled on Mrs. Parker’s white shag rug—and gestured for her to follow. The first floor of Ted’s house was all open space and wide doorframes, and I didn’t want Hugh to see us talking. The pale, rounded shapes of the sofa and armchairs floated in the dark like blind, cave-dwelling creatures.
“What?” asked Molly, her face in shadow.
“You should go,” I said. “I think Hugh will do whatever he can to get you alone again.”
“That might be a little difficult,” Molly laughed, gesturing toward the back of the house, where the party raged on. There were at least a hundred people at Ted’s by then.
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “This is a big house. It has a lot of doors.” A lot of bathrooms.
“Courtney.” Molly’s voice got very serious. “What did he do to you?”
“What do you think?” I asked bitterly, my voice cracking on the last word.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry, Courtney. I should have listened to you all along.”
“It’s all right,” I said. I had no patience for girl bonding at the moment; I just wanted her to go, so I’d know she was safe and I could go back to worrying about myself, about what Hugh would do when I didn’t show up in the barn, about how my last normal night was going to end.
In the front hall, I saw Lacey Stewart and her bathroom handmaidens come down the stairs, pulling on their coats. Lacey’s hair was wrapped in a towel.
“Listen, I’m leaving anyway,” Molly said. “Lacey’s sister is on her way to pick us up.”
“Good,” I said.
“I’ll see you at rehearsal on Monday,” said Molly, but rehearsal would be canceled that Monday, and by the time I saw Molly again, everything would be different.
I left her by the front door with her friends and plunged back into the party.
“There she is!” Melissa shrieked. She had one arm locked around Hilary’s neck now, the bottle of tequila still dangling
from one hand, Selena shaking her ass to the music alongside them. “Courtney! Get over here! We’re the senior bitches! We need to do a senior bitch shot!” Selena reached out for a hug that turned into dancing, and Melissa waved the tequila in my face.
“Have you guys seen Ted?” I asked.
“He went outside with Hugh. I think to smoke cigars or something?” Selena made a face.
“Senior bitch shot!” screamed Melissa.
“We’re wasted!” added Hilary with glee.
I stood still with Selena’s hands on my shoulders as she gyrated to a song that dated back to our middle school dances. Ted had gone outside with Hugh. But if Hugh thought he was meeting me in the barn, why wouldn’t he try to ditch Ted? I had spent all fall worrying that Ted didn’t know what Hugh was capable of, but what if I still didn’t know? I thought of the gun cabinet. Surely Hugh knew it was there; he knew the Parkers’ home as well as I did. It was locked, sure, but we both knew how to get into the barn, so he might be able to crack the cabinet just as easily. I shook off the thought. I was being crazy. But still, why was Ted with Hugh? What was Hugh telling him? I had to get down there.
“I’m going to find the boys,” I yelled over the music, and the girls wailed “Nooooooo!” and Selena clamped her hands down on my shoulders. “Yes,” I said, trying to pry her off.
“Shot first.” Melissa shoved the bottle under my nose and I took a swig just to get her off my case, nearly gagging as the cheap liquor hit my mouth.
The song changed to something from our childhood, Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” The girls screamed with joy, and Selena lifted her hands off my shoulders. I scooted away from them and out the glass doors onto the deck, wiping my mouth with my hand. Across the yard, through the drizzle, I could see that the light was on in the barn, and the large doors were slightly ajar. I sprinted down the gentle slope of the backyard toward the building, sliding now and then on the wet grass.
The scene on the other side of the barn door was not what I expected. The room seemed empty at first, and then I saw that the trapdoor to the root cellar was open, a black gaping maw in the floor. Taking a step closer, I saw Ted’s blond head, bright under the bare bulbs along the rafters, bent down.
“Ted?” I said.
“Court?” He looked up, and for one second I thought he was angry, frighteningly furious, but then I saw that I was wrong: he was near tears.
He took a step back, and I saw that next to him, on the floor of the root cellar, was Hugh. Or Hugh’s body, to be more exact. The nausea struck me then, a whole new brand of it than the seasickness that had afflicted me since the night Hugh had raped me. He was lying on the floor of the root cellar, limbs splayed, with blood seeping from his head and his neck cocked at a horrible, unnatural angle.
“He’s dead,” Ted was crying now. “Huey. What was he even doing out here?”
I sent him out here. Maybe there had been moments when I’d wished Hugh dead. Maybe there had been a lot of them. But I’d never really wanted to kill him. Had I?
I stared down at Ted crouched over Hugh’s body, feeling dizzy and numb. I ought to be doing something, I knew, calling the police or running up to the house, or maybe crying in the root cellar with Ted.
But I just stood there, staring, wishing it had been me who’d stepped through the trap door, that it was me lying there with a broken neck.
Chapter 18
“So you and Mr. Parker found the body around midnight?” Detective Soleto had assured me the questions were routine, that she was interviewing everyone who’d been at the Parkers’ house the night before. But she had asked me this twice already. The way she kept flicking her eyes from the folder open in front of her to my face and back again was making me nervous.
“Yes.”
“Tell me again why you went out to the barn.”
“We could see that the light was on and the door was open from the house. The barn was supposed to be locked.”
After Ted had called the police on Friday night, he’d asked me if I could say that he and I had come down to the barn together and had found Hugh at the same time. That he had gotten there a minute or two before me was meaningless, but the police would likely read into it somehow. I asked him why he’d been in the barn at all, and he said that Hugh had wanted to show him something, and hadn’t said what. I didn’t know what to make of that, but part of me thought that Hugh had been about to reveal to Ted what he’d done to me, and that part of me was glad he was dead.
“Did Hugh have a key?”
“A key to what?”
Detective Soleto raised her eyes slowly from the file, taking me in. “To the barn. How did he get in?”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s easy. The doors aren’t flush, so you can use a stick to unhook the latch.”
“Really?” the detective nodded appraisingly. “And this was a trick Hugh knew?”
I suddenly felt like I was on unsteady ground, although I wasn’t sure exactly why.
“Well, yeah. Ted and his brother Tom both do it all the time. I’ve seen them do it, I’m sure Hugh did, too.”
“Hmm.” Her eyes returned to the file on the table. “And you’re sure that you and Mr. Parker walked through the door at the same time. One of you wasn’t a single step ahead of the other?” The skepticism that had been evident on her face from the start finally leaked into her voice.
“I—I guess Ted was in front of me. I don’t really remember. I’d had a lot to drink,” I fumbled. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I prayed she wouldn’t test my blood. In truth I’d only had the two shots of tequila Melissa had practically poured down my throat, and that had been hours ago.
Detective Soleto flipped the folder closed. “Well, you certainly look like you’re in rough shape this morning,” she said. She studied my face, which I knew was pale and pouched from fear and lack of sleep. She leaned toward me slightly and said, almost conspiratorially, “You know, a grilled cheese before bed will make the morning much easier to handle.” She sat back. “Just a bit of advice. For when you turn twenty-one.” She lifted an eyebrow.
I managed a wan smile—it seemed to be the reaction she was looking for—and thought we must be nearly finished. I slid my arms into the sleeves of my coat, draped over the back of my chair, and gathered my purse. As I stood, she slapped the folder open again.
“Just one more thing, Miss Valance. It’s a challenge to put together a timeline of events when we have such a large pool of witnesses. Everyone remembers different details, and we’re still not sure what might be relevant. And of course, alcohol and drugs are factors here. We heard from several people that you were talking to Mr. Marsden in the living room not long before he went out to the backyard. Do you recall what you spoke about?”
I flinched before I could stop myself. I realized, suddenly, how we must have looked: Hugh’s hands around my wrists, our faces close together. I had assumed no one was paying attention, and that if someone had been, they’d have seen my discomfort. But why would they? We must have looked like we were about to make out. And the detective had a point; everyone had been buzzed by that time.
“No idea,” I told her. I widened my eyes, trying to look innocent and upset. “I mean, I remember that we talked for a sec in the middle of everything. But I don’t think it was about anything important. Hugh liked to tease, me in particular.” I summoned all the chops I had to look sad. Maybe I could even force a tear. “I just can’t believe he’s gone.”
“It’s a tragic accident,” admitted Detective Soleto. “And very likely to draw a lot of attention to responsible property maintenance and underage drinking in our community. I don’t think we’ll see any parties in Belknap like the one last night anytime soon.”
I composed my face to look appropriately chastised. “I certainly don’t want to see any parties for a long time.”
“Well, Miss Valance, thank you for coming in. If anything else comes up, I know where to find you.” It sounded vaguely threatening, and my heart
was pounding when I went out.
My mother was standing near the reception desk of the police station, speaking in hushed tones to a few other parents. Her eyes were red and she held out her arms when I came out. “Oh, honey. Are you okay? I am just so sorry all you kids have to go through something like this. It’s horrible, just horrible.”
“I’m fine,” I muttered. “Can we go home?” It was five in the morning, and we’d been there for hours.
“Of course. Let’s get you to bed.”
When we got home, I went straight upstairs, tripped over Anna’s old Docs getting into her creaky old bed with the bears, and slept for six hours. When I woke up, I ate the chocolate cream donut my father had bought me that morning and called Lexi.
She took the news of Hugh’s death in stride.
“I’m glad,” she said.
“Are you really?” I asked around a mouthful of sugar. I sipped some coffee and savored the way it blended with the crumbs on my tongue.
“Are you really asking me that?” asked Lexi, incredulous. “You know better than anyone that he was a psychopath.”
When I pictured Hugh’s face as it had been that night in Melissa’s guest bathroom, over my shoulder in the mirror, I felt the same way she did. I was glad he was gone, and I hoped that he was in hell. But when I remembered the scene in the barn, Hugh’s mangled body and Ted’s tears, I felt ashamed, like my soul must be black and shriveled.
“Ted was really upset,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Look, Courtney. I’m not saying Ted’s a dupe. But Hugh was a psychopath. Ted only knew the Hugh that Hugh wanted him to know.”
“I guess,” I said.
“I don’t think we can go to the police now,” Lexi said casually, as if it were an afterthought. “It would only cast suspicion on you, and the whole point was to stop him from doing it to other girls. You’ve done that now.”
“I didn’t do anything, Lexi.” I put my head in my hands. The way she said it, she thought it was empowering, a victory. “I know it’s my fault he’s dead, but I didn’t do anything.”
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